Season 6 Episode 1: She’s Having My Baby (1)

The season 6 premiere, the most-watched episode in the history of the series, and the start of a storyline the show would eventually take back entirely. It opens with Marcy and Jefferson arriving at the Bundy house to announce that Marcy is pregnant. Al’s response is pure delight, not for them but at them, because as far as he is concerned Jefferson’s life has just ended and he intends to enjoy watching it happen. He is still laughing when Peg tells him that the Bundys are expecting as well. The rest of the episode is Al processing that information, which he does badly. He is forty-something, he sells women’s shoes, and the arithmetic of a fourth mouth on his salary does not work under any conditions. His hair begins falling out at an accelerated rate. Bud and Kelly, who are no happier about acquiring a sibling than their father is about acquiring a child, spend the episode laying guilt on him for having done this to them. Jefferson, meanwhile, is thrilled, compares himself to Michael Jordan, and throws himself into fetching things for his wife. The episode’s centerpiece is a nightmare in which Al meets his new child, a three hundred pound adult played by an uncredited Abraham Benrubi, who at the time was starring on Parker Lewis Can’t Lose over on the same network. Twenty-nine point two million people watched this, and nothing the series did afterward came close. It is also, in hindsight, one of the stranger pieces of television history the series produced, because almost everything it sets up would be formally declared to have never happened.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: September 8, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 1
• Overall episode number: 106
• Written by: Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: August 16, 1991
• Production note: Watched by 29.2 million viewers, the highest rated episode of the entire run.
• Production note: Starting with this episode, Ted McGinley is credited as a series regular, billed after David Faustino.
• Title note: A play on the 1988 film She’s Having a Baby, with a nod to the Paul Anka and Odia Coates duet “(You’re) Having My Baby.”

Guest Cast

• Abraham Benrubi as the baby (uncredited)
• Edd Hall as the announcer (voice)

The Pregnancy That Never Happened

The storyline exists because Katey Sagal was pregnant in real life. Rather than shoot around it, the writers wrote the pregnancy into the show, which is why Peggy spends the early part of season 6 expecting. Sagal later miscarried, and the production handled the problem by writing episode 11, “Al Bundy, Shoe Dick,” to establish that the previous ten episodes had all been a dream of Al’s. That retcon is the reason both Peggy and Marcy are abruptly no longer pregnant by midseason. When Sagal was pregnant again during seasons 8 and 10, the show took the other route and either wrote her out temporarily or hid it with props and camera angles.

Knowing where it ends up changes how this episode plays. The first ten episodes of season 6 are, in the final accounting, a nightmare Al has about what another child would do to him, and this premiere is where the nightmare starts. It is a better framing than the show had any right to get out of an unplanned production problem.

Abraham Benrubi’s giant baby is the image everyone remembers. He got no credit for it, and he came back to the series properly two seasons later as Cousin Jimmy in “The Wedding Repercussions.”

Season 6 also brought new opening credits footage for three of the leads. Amanda Bearse gets Marcy waving at the Bundys’ front door before it shuts in her face and then trying to peer in. David Faustino’s clip is the shirtless dumbbell scene lifted from “Wabbit Season.” Ted McGinley gets Jefferson at a bar watching a dancer. In this episode’s version of the credits he pours beer on himself in distraction, which was quietly fixed for the rest of the season.

Famous Quotes

• Bud, during a shift massaging his mother’s feet alongside his father, on Al’s reproductive track record: he calls him “Johnny Appleseed.”
• Jefferson, on his own virility after the announcement: he compares himself to Michael Jordan, who at that moment was playing about fifteen miles from the Bundy house.

Notes

• This is the first of several season 6 episodes in which Peggy is visibly pregnant.
• The pregnancy arc runs through episode 10 and is undone by episode 11.
• Abraham Benrubi was appearing on FOX’s Parker Lewis Can’t Lose at the time, which aired Sunday nights alongside this show.
• Edd Hall, the announcer heard in the dream sequence, was the longtime announcer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.